5/20/2015

Tsireh, Awa - Smithsonian American Art Museum

also known by his Spanish name, Alfonso Roybal, represent an encounter between the art traditions of native Pueblo peoples in the Southwestern United States and the American modernist art style begun in New York, which spread quickly across the country.

It is a story of native and Anglo influences coming together to create an unlikely new hybrid kind of art, one that delighted those who saw it through its unusual blending of cultures.The artist decorated pottery as a young man on the San Ildefonso Pueblo near Santa Fe. Later, at the encouragement of Anglo patrons, he translated the forms and symbols of his pottery designs into watercolor paintings on paper. His stylized forms echoed the Art Deco aesthetic that was so popular between the two world wars, and his linear compositions appealed to modernist sensibilities. Soon Awa Tsireh’s art found an audience among the many artists, writers, educators, anthropologists, and archeologists who discovered the charms of the ancient cultures of the Southwest and descended on Santa Fe in great numbers. (04.09.2015 - 31.01.2016). (Text: Smithsonian American Art Museum)